Literature

For those of you who don't swim against the chronological current of the blog (or who don't read the comments section), I just wanted to point you to an anecdotal addendum that Gerald Howard sent in for my post last week on the passing of editors Ted Solotaroff and Rust Hills. I had quoted Howard's appreciation of Solotaroff; he adds his memory of watching Hills in action, along with another Viking Penguin editor, Cork Smith:

These two ur-WASP gentlemen were tossing around what might be the contents of the eventual anthology GREAT ESQUIRE FICTION, and it was sort of wonderful to watch them and then it was sort of excruciating, as there was a lot of fumbling around and opinions that never yielded any concrete result and pointless general woolgathering. I eventually absented myself, but the book of course lived up to its title.

He also reminds us of a further connection between the two men: Solotaroff's response to Hills's "Red Hot Center" (in his map of the American literary establishment) gave him the title for his essay collection, The Red Hot Vacuum.

What a pleasure to hear that direct reminiscence. If there are any other readers with memories of Hills or Solotaroff, I'd love to hear them. --Tom

P.S. Why are editors so often referred to as "legendary"? I used it a couple times in my post, and Howard used it too to describe Cork Smith (while acknowledging its diluted power by calling him "TRULY legendary"). I guess it's fairly obvious: editors do their work in the dark for the most part, and, like Negro League ballplayers or old whaling captains, their reputations are built by word of mouth. And so, in keeping with the exacting use of language that is their profession, "legendary" is a literal description (if an overused one): legendary editors are the ones we tell stories about. So please: more legends, about these or other editors!

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we make it easy for you to find banned books, talk about a revolution, and continue our obsession with the Twilight debates.

How do you get teens to read a book? Ban it.
The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and the American Library Association (ALA) launched a Banned Books Week website this week. Censorship is no laughing matter, but it still cracks me up that the people who work so hard to ban books don't seem to get how much banning helps a book. During Banned Books Week (September 27 - October 4) bookstores and librarians will display these books, and bloggers will list them and link to them for people to buy--while all the lonely non-banned titles sit on the shelves, wishing they were just a little more controversial.

So, I'm doing my part now for the continued success of the following books, YA and adult titles for teens among the 10 most challenged in 2007:

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
TTYL by Lauren Myracle
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

You can see the full list with the reasons for the bans, plus more stats from 1990-2007, on the ALA website. (Reported yesterday by SLJ)

What I'm Reading Now: The Revolution of Sabine
Beth Levine Ain's The Revolution of Sabine came to me just at the right time. I watched HBO's John Adams a couple of weeks ago, devouring the whole series DVD-style in a couple of days--so I'm pretty into Ben Franklin and powdered wigs. It's a great idea: what better setting for a rebellious teen than an actual revolution? (Sabine is from a French aristocratic family in the 1770s.) The early scenes have a slight Edith Wharton-like sensibility, with strict fashion rules and an overbearing, social-climbing mother who is devastated when Ben Franklin fails to show up at her ball: "How will they manage to run a whole country when their leaders behave this way?"

Quick links...
ALAN (Assembly for Literature of Adolescents) has posted a preliminary schedule for their 2008 ALAN Workshop, coming up in November. With titles like "Gods, Foods, and Tattoos: The Mixed Mythos of Urban Fantasy" and "Advice for the Lovelorn: Dating Faux Pas and Successes in Young Adult Literature," it looks pretty intriguing. 

Yesterday, Alison Morris on PW's ShelfTalker blog linked to Flux ("A new imprint dedicated to fiction for teens"), complimenting them on their teen-friendly covers. Then Flux linked to ShelfTalker complimenting Alison Morris on her "awesome post." Ah, blog love.

In the Salt Lake Tribune, columnist Rebecca Walsh talks about how Breaking Dawn author Stephenie Meyer is now getting it from all sides (with one LDS blogger even calling for her to be excommunicated). Walsh's take? Lighten up, people.
--Heidi

I'm often on the obit desk here at Omni central, and were I not on vacation last week I would have liked to note the passing, nearly in tandem, of two legends of the rather narrow field of magazine fiction editing, Ted Solotaroff (mostly at his own paperback-style journal, The New American Review) and Rust Hills (mostly at Esquire, back when it was the best magazine in the business, and then later when it wasn't). But happily, especially since my knowledge of their careers is mainly second- and third-hand, others have stepped in, including Thomas Beller in Slate, who speculates why both men still had a hunger to find and edit new work long after they had left their powerful positions:

Editing is really about deciding—you have to decide whether you like the overall voice and content of what you are reading, and if you do, you have to make certain decisions about the internal life of the piece. Editing can be at its most profound when it involves making a vague, almost aphoristic remark that might change a writer's entire focus, and it can be most profound when it entails wrestling with minutia, adding commas or subtracting them and, in this tiny way, changing the whole style and feel of a piece of writing. The malleability of a piece of writing as it is experienced by the reader in draft form makes reading more taxing than it would be on the printed page. But it also brings with it a bump of excitement. It lends a feeling of power and adventure to the reading experience. I assume that this feeling of power—and also, if you are discovering a writer, the vicarious sense of accomplishment and, finally, the bright moment of seeing beyond what is there on the page to what could be there—is what draws people to being fiction editors, especially fiction editors for magazines, which is one of the strangest and hardest-to-describe professions. There used to be so many of them! Where have they gone?

Beller also recommends the "bracing" charms of "Writing in the Cold," an essay of Solotaroff's describing all a young writer is up against (collected in A Few Good Voices in My Head, and also, as far as I can tell from the publisher's site, in the more recent--and still in print--collection, The Literary Community).

You can read what the embalmer of record, the New York Times, said about Solotaroff and Hills; Bruce Weber's Hills piece is notable both for its fantastically glamorous 1973 photo (my god, that hair!), copied above, and for this equally fantastic sentence: "With a brilliant smile and the early facial creases of happy dissipation, he was known for being cranky, curious, passive-aggressive and, most of all, persnickety." Weber quotes Ann Beattie as saying he was "great at titles," a talent he took to excess, in a 70s-time-capsule sort of way, in what Weber calls his "fussy-man trilogy" of essay collections, How to Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man, How to Retire at 41, or Dropping Out of the Rat Race Without Going Down the Drain, and How to Be Good, or the Somewhat Tricky Business of Attaining Moral Virtue in a Society That’s Not Just Corrupt But Corrupting, Without Being Completely Out-of-It. Hills's most notorious achievement was his stunt feature in Esquire in 1963 diagramming, unapologetically, "The Structure of the American Literary Establishment," grouping writers, agents, publishers, etc., around the "red-hot center" of American writing (which I think was The Paris Review). Has no enterprising and nostalgic young blogger dug out that old issue and scanned the map? I can't find it anywhere on the web...

Also in Slate, fairly-legendary-himself editor Gerald Howard contributed an appreciation of Solotaroff's New American Review, which lasted from 1967 to 1977 as a one-of-a-kind literary phenomenon that it seems could only have existed (barely) at that cultural moment: a regular highbrow anthology, curated by a single visionary editor and published in mass market form, selling 100,000 copies in drugstores as well as bookstores. Howard's list of some of its remarkable contributors is too long to reproduce, but his assessment of the "best literary magazine ever" isn't: "Man, did it deliver."

As Beller notes, there were enough copies of the NAR bought that you'll still run across old issues in used bookstores all the time: a few have passed through my own hands over the years, although I can't find any on my shelves now (maybe because I ran across them so much I just figured I could dip my hand back down in the stream any time to pick out another). An assiduous user of our search mechanism could put together her own inexpensive collection, including the first issue, an inscribed copy of which Howard counts among his most valued possessions.

--Tom

In celebration of Harry Potter's birthday (who happens to share a birthday with his creator, J.K. Rowling), this morning, millions of Harry Potter fans around the world woke up (or will soon wake up) to some very exciting news: the announcement of the worldwide release of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a very special book of five fairy tales written to supplement the Harry Potter series. In December 2007, Amazon was fortunate to come into possession of one of the original copies and it was our privilege to share images and reviews of this incredible artifact. Available in a standard edition and a collector's edition, which is exclusive to Amazon.com, these new editions of The Tales of Beedle the Bard will be available on December 4, 2008.

The Standard Edition features all five fairy tales from the original The Tales of Beedle the Bard, an introduction and illustrations by J.K. Rowling, and commentary on each of the tales by Professor Albus Dumbledore.

Housed in its own slipcase--made to resemble a wizarding textbook found in the Hogwarts library--the luxuriously packaged Collector's Edition includes metal corners, clasp, and skull; a reproduction of J.K. Rowling's handwritten introduction; commentary on each of the tales by Professor Albus Dumbledore; and 10 additional illustrations not found in the Standard Edition (or the original).

In a press release Rowling said: "There was understandable disappointment among Harry Potter fans when only one copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard was offered to the public last December.  I am therefore delighted to announce that, thanks to the generous support of Bloomsbury, Scholastic, and Amazon (who bought the handwritten copy at auction)--and with the blessing of the wonderful people who own the other six original books--The Tales of Beedle the Bard will now be widely available to all Harry Potter fans."

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is published by The Children's High Level Group (CHLG), registered charity number 1112575, a charity co-founded in 2005 by J.K. Rowling and Emma Nicholson MEP to make life better for vulnerable children. All net proceeds from the sale will be donated to The Children's Voice campaign.

--BTP

The fall awards season kicked off today with the announcement of the longlist for the Booker Prize, 13 books long to be exact. As usual it's a mix of books that have already come out in the US, ones that are out in the UK but not the US, and ones that haven't come out anywhere yet:

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold (out here and in the UK in November)
• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
• From A to X by John Berger
• The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
• The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant (available in Canada and the UK)
• A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
• The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (UK edition; out in the US in February)
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
• The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

A couple of big names (Rushdie, fresh off defending his Best of the Bookers crown, as well as former prize-hating Booker winner John Berger), but on a list this long, the immediate story is who was left off and in this case that includes big and biggish names like Peter Carey, Tim Winton, James Kelman, and Zoe Heller. There's been a very active discussion board on the Booker site, with a lot of debate about possible nominees--often by people who have actually read the books!--but when they tallied their longlist predictions, they didn't fare so well, getting only Rushdie, Barry, Hanif, and Adiga right. Among those they were particularly excited about that didn't make it were Winton's Breath, Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia, and Damon Galgut's The Impostor.

What will move on to the shortlist (announced September 9)? Netherland is probably the best-reviewed book of the year so far in the US (where it is set), but I don't think it's been quite as rapturously received in the UK, while my sense is that Rushdie's book was better reviewed in the UK (at least by John Sutherland, who doesn't have to eat his copy yet) than here. We've made both Enchantress of Florence and A Case of Exploding Mangoes Best of the Month picks so far this year. And most of the talk about the longlist will likely center on Child 44, a highly promoted and well-reviewed debut that is an unabashed thriller (see Richard K. Morgan on Omni earlier this month on genre fiction and the Booker). The one I'm most intrigued by is Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole, which has gotten comparisons to Dickens, Irving, David Foster Wallace, Marisha Pessl, and last year's finalist Nicola Barker for being both enormous and hilarious. --Tom

Last night I was watching the Mad Men season premiere with rapt attention (along with several other million folks, no doubt) and was surprised to see a volume of poetry, of all things, find its way into Don Draper's hands. First I thought, "Wow. Frank O'Hara. Where is this going..." Followed quickly by: "I bet it's on Movers & Shakers tomorrow." And lo and behold, there it is, Meditations in an Emergency, currently at  #233 (up 6,436%!). We usually see this kind of bump when authors receive national media attention (see also: Stephen Colbert), but in recent years we've also seen interest spike when books make even a cameo appearance in popular TV shows. (Remember The Sopranos and The Art of War?)

I'm curious to see if the O'Hara will hold rank over the next few days as other viewers catch up with the first episode of the season. Really though, what an interesting choice. There are few writers more evocative of New York in the post-war, early-Beat era than Frank O'Hara, who the New York Times profiled just a few weeks ago on the subject of his Selected Poems, released earlier this year. (The opening line of the review, that "death is often a good career move in poetry," seems--as grim it as it sounds--ever more the case now.) O'Hara's New York isn't quite Don Draper's, not yet anyway, but for those of you haven't yet seen O'Hara's quasi-appearance on Mad Men, trust me when I say it's pretty powerful... or, take the word of this Amazon reviewer: "Never heard of it, but saw it on Mad Men last night.  So now I have to get it." --Anne

Talking about yourself in the third person is generally reserved for dictators, professional athletes, and movie stars, but in this morning's Washington Post, Irish author John Banville manages to refer himself as "John Banville" without making you feel like the cultural apocalypse is nigh. It's a necessity, in fact, because Banville, for publishing purposes, has become two people, the Booker Prize-winning literary novelist John Banville and the mystery writer Benjamin Black. It's a fascinating piece about why a writer might choose to write (openly) under two names: for one thing, it's refreshingly clear that Banville doesn't think of "John Banville" as his authentic, only self--or at least he doesn't think so any more. Instead, it's as much of a pen name, a put-on identity, as "Benjamin Black." And, to hear him tell it, Benjamin Black is having a lot more fun:

Banville takes three to five years to finish a book. Black can do it in that many months. That's because "what you get with John Banville is an extreme of concentration. What you get with Benjamin Black is, I hope, spontaneity." He's writing "very quickly, very fluently, and not thinking about it."...

"Benjamin Black is like a schoolboy who's been given an extra week's Christmas holiday," Banville says.

"This, of course, is worrying. To enjoy writing is deeply worrying. I must be doing something wrong."...

"I see now that it was a device to get John Banville to think differently," he explains. For too long he'd been writing first-person narratives about men in deep trouble who are all "intensely telling their own story."

By comparison, in his Wikipedia entry his first wife is quoted as saying that living with Banville, when writing as Banville, was like being with "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing."

According to the Post profile, the two identities might be moving closer to being one, with the next Banville novel having learned a few things from Black, and the next Black sounding like it's heading into Banville territory. Such fraternizing with a pop genre, by the way, is a remarkable move for someone who accepted his Booker Prize in 2005 by lamenting how middlebrow the award had become in recent years and saying "It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker prize."

If, like me, you still haven't read either B, the three Benjamin Black books (all published since the last Banville appeared--can you tell he's having fun?) are Christine Falls, The Silver Swan, and The Lemur (new this summer). He's been more prolific (over a much longer time) as Banville, whose best-known books are The Sea, which beat out one of the best shortlists in memory (Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, etc.) to win the Booker and become his first book to sell more than a few thousand copies, and The Book of Evidence, which many have called his masterpiece and which I've been told by The Greatest Banville Fan of Them All, The Elegant Variation's Mark Sarvas, is the place to begin. --Tom

Today at Comic-Con it was announced that the always experimental Stephen King is offering an original 25-episode graphic video adaptation (running approximately two minutes each) of his previously unpublished short story, "N."
Included in his upcoming story collection, Just After Sunset, "N" concerns a shared obsession between a psychiatrist and one of his patients.

Continue reading to watch a preview of "N" or visit the NisHere website for more details. The entire series will be collected on a DVD available in a limited-edition collector's set of Just After Sunset. "N" will also be adapted as a comic book series in 2009. Viewers will be able to purchase "N" online, and in five-episode blocks on Amazon Unbox. The first episode will be available on Monday, July 28, with a new episode shown each weekday through August 29.

King says: "I'm always interested in new delivery systems for stories and always curious about how those systems work with the old storytelling verities. This one, it seems to me, works extraordinarily well."

--BTP

It's become kind of a joke around here that I can trace some convoluted friend-of-friend(-of-friend) relationship with just about anybody who walks in the door--I am, apparently, the Kevin Bacon of internet book retailing. I'm not sure if it's that I'm actually more connected to people (it's hard to believe it, since I actually don't get out of the house very much), or just that I'm always curious about finding out if I am. But the most fun of these connections (better even than figuring out with Khaled Hosseini that I went to high school with his wife) I knew about ahead of time: when The Confessions of Max Tivoli made Andrew Sean Greer a household name a few years ago (at least among households that read a lot), my mom mentioned that she was his science teacher back in junior high in Rockville, Md. So when he came by our offices to talk about his new book, The Story of a Marriage (which, by the way, was the most one of our author meetings has ever felt like a book club: no publishing gossip or book-tour tales--everybody wanted to talk passionately about, yes, the book itself), I sprung that connection on him and it was a pleasure to see him light up and say he remembered her well.

Well, a while later, after I had passed on his greetings to my mom, she sent me a photo that the school had unearthed of Andy starring in the 8th grade musical, in the plum role of Curly in Oklahoma!--complete with bright red chaps and mid-'80s aviator glasses. I immediately passed it on to Andy to check whether a) it was okay to post it on the blog, and b) it was actually him, because I knew he had an identical twin brother. Andy replied that it was, in fact, his brother Mike (he could tell by the glasses), but that they had both been in the show and he thought he could dig up one of himself. And indeed he did, so you can compare:

If you want to make further comparisons, check the more up-to-date photos of Andy and Mike (who has the not-at-all-funny job of Director of Web Technology at